


The Telling of the Tale, Pt. 2

by gypsyweaver



Series: A Tale of Crowns and Coins [31]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Exposition, God Hates Beelzebub, Heaven is Terrible (Good Omens), Hell is Terrible (Good Omens), M/M, Multi, Nonbinary Beelzebub (Good Omens), Other, POV Crowley (Good Omens), Plot, They/Them Pronouns for Beelzebub (Good Omens), Trauma, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:28:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28109355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gypsyweaver/pseuds/gypsyweaver
Summary: Beelzebub continues their tale, of what happened to Aziraphale after God stole him away, and how they came to be a demon.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Beelzebub (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Beelzebub & Crowley (Good Omens), Beelzebub/Gabriel (Good Omens)
Series: A Tale of Crowns and Coins [31]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1684990
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	The Telling of the Tale, Pt. 2

**Author's Note:**

  * For [killerweasel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/killerweasel/gifts).



> CW: Non-gory descriptions of violence, stolen child trauma, past rape (not graphic)

Their kiss was still warm on Crowley’s lips when they dropped the news.

“Adam, the Antichrist,” they said. “Your brother.”

Aziraphale stared at Beelzebub in disbelief, and Crowley felt a strange, almost vertiginous shift. His guts lurched and his head spun as Beelzebub confirmed a long-held suspicion. As Beelzebub changed the world with five words.

“He’s yours, then?” Crowley asked.

“Yes. Who else?” Beelzebub returned. “I’d already done it once, and Lucifer did not want any mistakes.” They paused. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard. Most of the lower-downs were present at the conception. I assumed the news would percolate...that you would have heard.”

“No,” Crowley replied. “I stayed away from Hell. I stayed away from all of it.” He paused, and the rest of their words caught up to him. “What do you mean, ‘at the conception?’ Did he use some kind of unholy spirit, or something?”

“No,” they replied. “Black candles, black altar, all of that.”

“Did he at least shrink himself down?”

“What do you think, Crowley?” They shuddered. “It was one of the most painful experiences of my existence.”

“Did you know that we had the wrong boy?” Aziraphale asked, softly. “The whole time, did you know?”

“I-I did,” Beelzebub admitted. “In fact, I think that my decision did more to avert the Apocalypse than anything else, though I didn’t understand it at the time. I was just protecting my sons. Both of them.”

“Protecting? Seriously?” Crowley sputtered. “You let us raise Warlock...six years we spent with that boy--” He gestured feebly, helplessly.

“Do you regret it?”

“Wha--?”

“Do you regret one single moment that you spent with that boy?” Beelzebub asked.

“No, but--”

“I always knew where my sons went,” Beelzebub said. “I knew you had the wrong boy, and I let you keep him.”

“Why, then?” Crowley spat.

“We’ll get there,” Beelzebub said, and drained the last of their coffee. “The short version is that Warlock needed you, and Adam did not. Warlock may not be an Antichrist, but I assumed that he was important to God's plan. I will get to that part, Crowley. I promise." They paused. "But I was on my first son.”

“Please continue, by all means,” Crowley said.

“I kept you with me, Aziraphale, for two years,” Beelzebub began, again. “Two years, and I loved you as I’d loved no other thing. You were the finest thing that I ever made. My children remain my proudest accomplishments.” They paused and beamed a bright smile at Aziraphale, who looked away from its intensity and blushed. “I kept you away from the other angels. More as a matter of course than of choice. Raphael was jealous, and he kept me away from the others. Nobody else was given a pupil, and he assumed that his siblings would steal from him, given half a chance.”

“Would they have?” Aziraphale asked.

“Very few even knew that I existed,” Beelzebub said with a shrug. “They all had their own favorites, in the Garden and beyond. It’s possible, but I would not have gone willingly. I served Raphael, and tried to do so well.”

“He was just the jealous sort,” Aziraphale said, with a sniff. “No matter what you did.”

“Yes. And he was jealous of you,” Beelzebub agreed. “I do not know if he complained to the Almighty, or if She just decided that you weren’t useful as a toddler. One day, I was walking with you to the great clearing with the waterfall. You liked the fish, and we had found a melon patch nearby. I felt the Hand of God...the loss of my miracles...and then you were snatched away. I screamed for you, and God told me that She had great plans for you, and to be grateful for the chance to have borne you into the world.”

The pain was as fresh as it ever was, Crowley could tell. His friend looked stricken as they spoke.

“She aged you, and turned your hair white as snow. Before that, you had black hair, like your father and I. Curly, like his. Curlier, actually.” Their misty eyes reached across time, Crowley could tell, to the sight of their young, raven-haired son. “She made you an angel, but you were born a Nephilim...” They paused, swallowing down a sob. “Her changes didn’t matter. I would have recognized you, no matter what She did to you. I watched you in the Garden, as close as I dared get, as you trained with the others. As you guarded your gate.”

“I never saw you.”

“Yes, I stayed hidden,” they confirmed. “You only saw me once, I think.”

“I did?”

“If God allowed you to remember it, you saw me once,” Beelzebub confirmed. “But I was there--every morning, at least. You were still my son, no matter what color your hair was.”

Crowley could see Aziraphale flush. He was charming in his blushes, and in this, he saw Beelzebub so clearly. How could he have missed the similarities? But, everything is clearer through a rear view mirror, he supposed.

“Unfortunately, the lessons with Raphael continued,” Beelzebub said. Their tone was dark. “Just after you were taken from me, Raphael handled me more brutally than ever. He did not calm down until the Heavenly angels came to the Garden.”

“What brought that on? Raphael doesn't just calm down...?” Crowley asked. “Did Raphael suddenly grow a conscience?”

“Nothing like that,” Beelzebub said, and made a face. “Raphael once said that the reason that God gave me to him was because She didn’t make him with a conscience, so she gave him an external one.”

“Is that true?” Aziraphale asked.

“Who knows?” The Prince replied, benignly. “Raphael stopped being as violent when the Archangels began to use the clearing near our oak tree for their meetings. I think he knew...” They paused, turning to Gabriel. “I think that he knew that you and Michael would have stopped him, my love, if you had known what he was doing to me. Or you would have tried, at least.”

“I would have,” Gabriel confirmed.

“How did you...how did you have the time to look in on me?” Aziraphale asked. “Raphael was too jealous, you said. Did he become...busy?”

“Ah, yes. Good question,” Beelzebub replied. “He was. Things were changing in the Garden, and I was not quick to grasp it. I was grateful for my stolen moments, watching Michael run you around the Garden. I thought, based on how poorly that she treated you, that she must have known. Michael didn’t like me...I bested her in battle once, and she did not forget the humiliation.”

Crowley smiled at that. He'd heard the tale. But the significance of Beelzebub's victory seemed lost on Aziraphale.

“No, Michael is hard on everyone,” Aziraphale said, glumly. “I was just a miserable student. Everyone said so.”

“I loved teaching you,” they said. “You were very clever.”

“Nobody else agreed, I’m afraid.”

“I saw,” they said. “Everybody expected you to be able to do more because all of the angels were made with certain knowledges. Gabriel could throw a spear from the moment of his making. Crowley was a Starhanger, gifted with the knowledge of how the fabric of time and space draped, and how to fold it and pin it and cut it. I was born knowing the animals and the plants--and how to love, which is definitely not a universal skill. But you, my beautiful son, you were born an empty slate.”

“An empty slate...?” Aziraphale echoed.

“Yes, and while I tried to fill you in the two years that I had you, nothing would give you the kind of knowledge that Gabriel or Michael or Crowley or I were made with,” they said. “Nothing, save for time. So the others were short with you because they saw you as lacking. But you had something that most of them lacked.”

“A mother’s love?” Aziraphale asked.

“That, yes,” Beelzebub admitted. “But you also had compassion. Deep wells of it. Time and disappointment may have dried those wells, but there are some who can drink there, and drink deeply.”

They turned their blue eyes on Crowley, and he could feel them peeling back his skin, nerves, muscles. Seeing the essence beneath, his very soul. They smiled, and he knew that Aziraphale had inherited that as well. When he paid attention, he did so with an exclusivity that was commanding.

“Yeah...” Crowley said. “Selective compassion. That’s him.”

“He makes a fine principality,” Beelzebub said. “His chosen protectorate is...if I had to guess...you.”

“Apparently.”

“Good. He needs a protectorate that will protect him back,” Beelzebub said. “I did watch you, Aziraphale, as much as I could. I didn’t notice that Raphael was suddenly busy most mornings. Not at first. And when I did finally notice, I credited it with him being needed by our siblings from Heaven."

"He was," Gabriel confirmed. "We were in meetings over the humans. They weren't reproducing as the animals did...and Uriel thought the animals were reproducing past the capacity of the Garden. It was a mess."

"Yes," Beelzebub agreed. "And so, things were moving that I didn't understand, and was not privy to. Everything changed for me one morning. I was watching you, my sweet son, so hard at work with your sword. You tried to be a warrior, my dear boy, but you weren’t built for killing.”

Dear boy...the endearment echoed in Crowley's head, spoken a million times by Aziraphale. His mother's words for her child.

Aziraphale, for his part, agreed with Beelzebub's assessment of his abilities. "I never killed anything," he said. "Not directly." He shook his head and looked down into his cup.

“No, you were too much of me to be a killer. But I loved watching you at your exercises,” they said. “You were so earnest. And I was watching you when Lucifer collected me.”

“I remember...” Aziraphale said. “I thought that you’d come to laugh at me...you saw me, and you waved.”

“I did. And Lucifer led me away,” Beelzebub said. “He was still an angel then, and radiant. He took me by the hand and told me that God had taken me from Raphael and given me to him, and that I was to serve him as I had Raphael. The Almighty was with us, in Her usual invisible fashion. She told me the same thing that Lucifer did, and then She opened a hole. It went down into the main cavern of Hell, but I didn’t know what place it was. It was hot, and it smelled terrible. There was a fire down below, and it was such a large fire that I could not tell how far down the hole went.”

“Did he...did he make you go?” Aziraphale asked.

“He pushed me,” Beelzebub said. “Crowley was the first to Fall--the first to be expelled by God--but I was the first in the Lake.”

“Couldn’t you fly?” Gabriel asked.

His voice came suddenly and startled Crowley. “Yeah, of course we could,” he replied, venom in his voice. “That’s why we’re all still _angels_ , you wanker.”

Beelzebub’s hand landed again on Crowley’s, but their eyes were on Gabriel. “The heat seared off my feathers as soon as I tried,” they said. “I tumbled into the flames, and they did the rest. Soon, there were others Falling. One of the builders, one who would later be called Moloch, dragged me to the shore. Crowley was extracted by Lucifer.”

“I remember,” Crowley said, and he did.

He remembered Lucifer’s surprisingly tender touch as he pulled him from the flames and left him on the shore. He remembered the smell, the roasted flesh and burnt feathers. He remembered those blue eyes, and the gentle touch of Hell’s healer. He remembered. Just as he had remembered before, when the scene intruded upon him as Aziraphale’s gentle hands fell on his flesh.

“Do you remember when Lucifer found out that I could not heal him back to his angel form?” they asked. Their voice was hollow.

Crowley found that he could. “That’s why he beat you.”

“Lucifer?” Aziraphale said. “He beat you?”

“Nearly to destruction,” Beelzebub confirmed. “He left me to heal myself, but he promised me that if I ever failed him again, I’d get more of the same.”

“Beez...” Gabriel said, and his voice was strained.

The Archangel reached out, either to offer comfort or to ask for comfort, Crowley was not certain. Their hand had not left Crowley’s, but their other hand found Gabriel's.

“I failed Lucifer many times over the years,” Beelzebub said. “God chose the direction of this world long before She peopled it with us. Largely, our actions amount to the feeble struggles of a fly caught in a spider’s web. Lucifer never understood that. He never understood that our failures were part of the ineffable. As were our successes.” They paused. “But Lucifer never beat me as badly as that first time. God did not prepare him for what his rebellion would cost him. He could never abide what She took from him.”

They looked from Crowley, to Aziraphale, to Gabriel.

“At any rate, that’s when things began to get really bad,” they said, and their gaze settled back on Crowley. “That’s when Lucifer decided to rally the demons to war.”

**Author's Note:**

> For the ever lovely KillerWeasel, who has recently found my work and left comments! Thank you, my dear.
> 
> I don't think anything in this chapter needs footnotes, but do let me know if I missed something.
> 
> Comments and kudos are hot coffee on a cold day!


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